About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, a go-to-market strategy consultant at Union Square Consulting with 25+ years in sales and experience at Salesforce, joins Rachael Bueckert to dismantle the myth of the untouchable top performer. Reynolds argues that leaders who attribute top rep success solely to raw talent are missing a critical insight: these all-stars are often running better systems and processes than the organization itself has built. Rather than a recruiting problem, this is an operational one that costs companies dearly.
The core insight is this: if your growth strategy relies entirely on hiring A players, you've already set your organization up to fail. Reynolds and Bueckert walk through why so many organizations default to this broken model, using examples from his time at Salesforce where territory imbalance masked true performance and shadow systems revealed process gaps. The conversation cuts past the flattering narratives leaders tell themselves and into the uncomfortable truth about what top performers are actually telling you about the business underneath them.
The episode covers how to reverse engineer what your best rep is actually doing so B players can replicate it, why territory design often inflates A-player performance metrics, how to build systems where average reps on average days can succeed, the specific metrics to read (close rate, sales cycle, ASP) to separate process wins from lucky territory assignments, and the culture cost of letting all-stars operate outside the playbook. Reynolds makes the case that the real competitive advantage lies not in hiring unicorns, but in building an organization where B players can hit quota.
What we cover in this episode
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1:10
What top performers reveal about your business The gap between the playbook the organization has versus what A players have designed themselves.
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4:53
The A-player dependency trap Why leaning on A players is a growth strategy with a ceiling and why building for B players is critical at scale.
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6:41
Qualification and prospect selection Salesforce's best reps were best at walking away from poor opportunities and focusing only on winnable deals.
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9:08
Reverse engineering the top performer How to extract the playbook from your best rep and train the rest of your team to replicate it.
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9:46
The territory problem How oversized, rich territories inflate top performer metrics and mask whether they're actually executing better systems.
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10:45
Account stages and scoring Using automated account stages and dynamic scoring to ensure top accounts get covered even when assigned to A players.
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24:51
Reading metrics from right to left Analyzing close rate, ASP, and sales cycle to diagnose which rep behaviors drive performance and which are territory luck.
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42:31
Culture cost of passing on A players How exempting top reps from playbook compliance breeds resentment, attracts the wrong talent, and signals broken systems to high performers.
The lines worth sharing
If your entire go-to-market relies on your ability to hire A players, you're going to fail.
Eddie Reynolds · 2:31
The absolute best reps at Salesforce were best at one thing: walking away from poor opportunities.
Eddie Reynolds · 6:41
You need to build a process that an average person on an average day with average effort can succeed.
Eddie Reynolds · 18:13
If you haven't logged these fields in Salesforce, don't even talk to me. I'm going to look and if it's not there, I'm declining your meeting.
Eddie Reynolds · 23:12
Common questions from this episode
What does a top performer ignoring the playbook tell you about your sales organization?
It signals that your A player has designed a system better than the company playbook, usually around qualification and prospect selection. Rather than a talent signal alone, it reveals process and system gaps that B players could potentially replicate if extracted and codified into training.
How do you reverse engineer what a top performer does without cloning their idiosyncrasies?
Analyze metrics from right to left: close rate, ASP, and sales cycle first. If those match but pipeline differs, they're prospecting better. Look at activities, meetings, and conversion ratios. Extract the repeatable behaviors and process steps, then embed them into CRM and daily operations. Ignore domain knowledge or charisma you can't scale.
Why does territory design make top performers look better than they actually are?
Oversized, rich territories allow A players to ignore half their leads, accounts, and prospects and still rank number one. This masks whether they're executing superior qualification or simply cherry-picking from abundance. It also leaves good accounts neglected and demoralizes B players working harder in worse territories.
How should you handle account coverage when your best rep ignores tier-one accounts?
Implement automated account stages and dynamic scoring. Assign reps equal-quality account tiers, then flag accounts that haven't been touched in 90 days. Either reassign them or implement a free-game rule so other reps can grab neglected accounts. This ensures coverage without penalizing reps who execute better processes.
What percentage of quota should your A players deliver versus B players?
This is less important than the percentage of reps hitting quota overall. If 40% of your team hits quota, that's demoralizing and broken. Aim for significantly higher attainment across the org. If A players deliver 200%+ quota, that's fine—the real metric is whether B players can hit 100% when assigned equal-quality territories and given proper playbook and systems.
How common is it for top reps to run shadow systems outside the official tech stack?
Likely 80%+ based on industry observation. If your official systems aren't helping reps do their job, top performers will find alternatives. Rather than restrict them, investigate what tools they're using and why, then either bring that capability into the official stack or simplify your core systems to reduce the friction that creates shadow systems in the first place.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds explains what your top performer reveals about your sales org: why A-player dependency kills growth and how to build systems where B players hit quota.
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top performer sales rep
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Read the full transcript · 66 KB
EDDIE0:00If I walk into a new organization and I'm the Crow and I see I've got a few of these top performers,
EDDIE0:04the first thing that I want to do is I want to understand how are they doing this?
EDDIE0:07What leads are they working? What prospects are they working? What deals are they working? What is their qualification criteria,
EDDIE0:12and how can we map that to our playbook and train the rest of our reps
EDDIE0:15to use the same qualification criteria,
EDDIE0:17to spend their time on the same things, and to walk away from the things that they have less likely chance?
EDDIE0:22this is also a function of territory,
EDDIE0:24I've seen this firsthand, even at organizations like Salesforce that are supposed to know better than this.
EDDIE0:28You take your best reps and you think, okay, like there are best salespeople, great, let's give them the best accounts. I'm fine with
EDDIE0:33you give them such an enormous territory that they're able to ignore half of their leads, ignore half of their accounts and half their prospects,
EDDIE0:40still be number one on the dashboard.
EDDIE0:41And this is a disservice to the organization because you've got good leads, good prospects, and good existing customers that are being neglected.
EDDIE0:55actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL1:10Every sales org has won. The rep who ignores the playbook barely touches the CRM until a deal closes, runs the lowest activity on the team, and still outsells everyone else combined. Leaders usually explain it as raw talent and natural closer. You got lucky enough to hire. Eddie thinks these leaders are missing what's actually going on, and that the story you tell yourself about that rep shapes how your org scales.
RACHAEL1:33In this episode, we're getting to what that rep is really telling you about the business underneath them. Why leaning on them works right up until it doesn't, and what it costs you to keep running this way.
RACHAEL1:42Eddie, how's it going?
EDDIE1:44It's going well. I'm excited about this topic because I've worked with or had this person on my team in so many different organizations, like basically since I've been in sales my whole career. And I think that there's something to be said for talent. I don't want to take everything away from these folks, but I think there is oftentimes a huge gap in the process, and the systems and the operations that make these people perform so much better than everyone else.
EDDIE2:11And I remember seeing a post a while back and this really resonated with me. It was a crow that said this. And he's like, look, if your entire going to market relies on your ability to hire a players, you're going to fail. If you can't build a go to market where your B players can hit quota. Then you have said everyone up for failure, including the organization.
EDDIE2:31And I think like if you think about this from first principles, from investing, like I worked in the investing investment management space for a number of years before getting into into tech, you think about like, everybody wants to invest in anthropic, everybody wants to invest in OpenAI or space. And you never know whether where these companies are going to go.
EDDIE2:51But the hypothesis is that if the demand is so high, people are going to pay such a premium to invest in these companies. Is there an opportunity to earn an outsized return from that investment? The same is true for salespeople. If every single sales leader in the world is trying to hire the a player that was at 200% a quota, then it's a race to pay that person so much money that you can't make much profit off of it.
EDDIE3:15Ignoring the fact that there's only so many of these people in the world. So if you're trying to build an organization with 50, 100, 200, 1000 salespeople, whatever. You can't just hire a players. So if your whole system is built around the idea that only the A players can be successful, you're setting your entire company up for failure.
EDDIE3:32And I'm excited to dive into this because I've got like of scar tissue behind this and so many thoughts on it. So I'm glad that you suggested this as a topic today, Rachel.
RACHAEL3:42Deep wounds and scar tissue. And I feel like it's a topic that a lot of revenue leaders can associate with as well, because it seems like a pretty common thing.
EDDIE3:49Everybody wants to hire a players. I mean, it's just like like management one on one, not even sales one on one. Just anybody that manages any humans wants to hire a players. But there's only so many a players out there. And if you can build a system where B players can be successful, and I define A players as these people that will just win no matter what, and be players that can win in the right environment, and then C players that will not win no matter what, primarily just because they don't have the work ethic.
EDDIE4:16Right. And so like we can coach B players into A players if they want it bad enough. But the bottom line is there's a million salespeople out there that are just good at sales. They're not great, they're good, and they can thrive in the right organization, and they will fail miserably in most of the wrong organizations. And if you're a revenue leader, you want to be running the right organization, the one where the B players can succeed because that makes or breaks a company.
RACHAEL4:41Absolutely. So, Eddie, when you walk into an organization and you spot that rep who is ignoring the playbook but still outsells everyone, what's the first thing that that tells you about the business underneath them and how it's operating?
EDDIE4:53there's a number of things that this tells us. So let's make the assumption that this a player is indeed an A player, right? And by that, what I mean is this person works harder than everyone else. They work smarter than everyone else. They're more talented than everyone else. They're charismatic when they get on the phone or get into a meeting with a customer or a prospect like they win them over there, the kind of person you want to spend time with, they oftentimes are very intelligent and knowledgeable about their space.
EDDIE5:18Customers really value the opportunity to talk with them. So let's assume that these A players are those people, right. Because they could also be a different breed of person. They could be the person that's just been around forever. I mean, this is like classic 101 sales hiring. Be wary of the person was the that was the top performer in their organization and has been there for ten years because it's very possible they've stopped lasted.
EDDIE5:42Everyone else, all the better salespeople left and they got the best territory and they've just been writing it out, right. So let's assume these A players are indeed A players, and I'll touch on territory and leads and all these other things that can, you know, change that equation in a bit. What are these a player's doing? Well, ultimately like by definition these A players are following a series of steps that is leading them to win their calling.
EDDIE6:11Better prospects. They're chasing better leads. They are working better customers. If they work existing customers, they're focusing their time on better deals and they are running each step better than other reps. Specifically, what I saw when I worked at Salesforce is the absolute best reps we had at Salesforce were the best, the best, primarily at one thing, which was walking away from poor opportunities so they'd be working a deal, and they saw that, like maybe they could close the deal, but the chances were low and it was going to be a lot of work.
EDDIE6:41They just walked away. It's like I'm done. Like I'm not spending a minute of energy on this. I'm not even going to respond to the email, which you could argue as unprofessional. But just from a purely like performance perspective, like the people that didn't waste a minute of their time were the people that were most successful. So what does this mean for rev ops or go to market ops?
EDDIE6:57Well, what it means is, is that oftentimes these people have designed their own system and their own process and their own playbook that works better than the one that the company has. So you say, okay, these reps never want to log into Salesforce. Why is that? Because logging into Salesforce doesn't help them do their job. They either have a small enough number of deals and prospects that they can remember it in their head,
EDDIE7:18and or they're using another system to track that.
EDDIE7:21Because using Salesforce is two time consuming. You can solve this by making Salesforce easier to use. And we are huge proponents of like simplifying Salesforce so that all this data entry is automated with automations with AI, and then the stuff that sales reps actually have to manually update is just the most important stuff, right? So that's one example.
EDDIE7:43But taking a bigger step back from that, they've designed their own playbook. That's far better than the playbook the organization has, because the organization hasn't taken the time to reverse engineer what actually works for these reps, so that they can have a playbook for their B players to go and follow those same steps.
RACHAEL8:01And what are the components of of this playbook that they're running that is so much better than what the company just originally has.
EDDIE8:08But for me, like the absolute easiest way to be successful in sales is just to spend your time with the right prospects, right? So let's just assume that everybody's got the same quality of territories they are going to do, maybe not necessarily do more work, they might just naturally have more insight into which prospects are going to be better.
EDDIE8:29I mean, like, what's your classic, like, junior sales person that doesn't know what they're doing? Like, we talk about Happy Ears. They just get excited about every opportunity, every meeting, every deal, and don't realize that many of them are waste of time. Right. So first and foremost, they're qualifying things out. They understand, like how to identify the prospects in their CRM that are worth calling on.
EDDIE8:51They understand how to identify which leads are worth following up with, that they understand how to identify which opportunities they should be chasing. So what do you do with this? Right. If I walk into a new organization and I'm the Crow and I see I've got a few of these top performers, the first thing that I want to do is I want to understand how are they doing this?
EDDIE9:08What leads are they working? What prospects are they working? What deals are they working? What is their qualification criteria, and how can we map that to our playbook and train the rest of our reps to use the same qualification criteria, to spend their time on the same things, and to walk away from the things that they have less likely chance?
EDDIE9:24Now, this is also a function of territory, right? And I've seen this firsthand, even at organizations like Salesforce that are supposed to know better than this. You take your best reps and you think, okay, like there are best salespeople, great, let's give them the best accounts. I'm fine with that, but you give them such an enormous territory that they're able to ignore half of their leads, ignore half of their accounts and half their prospects, and still be number one on the dashboard.
EDDIE9:47And this is a disservice to the organization because you've got good leads, good prospects, and good existing customers that are being neglected. That's really, really bad for the organization, right? I'll stop there and I'll let you ask more questions, because I could really easily go on a soapbox here.
RACHAEL10:00I mean, this segways pretty much directly into the next question I was going to ask. Like, of course these reps are getting fed the best account, which makes sense because they've earned them. But you know, then you see these top logos getting neglected that other reps would kill to work. So how do you reconcile rewarding your best rep with making sure that every top account actually gets covered?
EDDIE10:20Okay, so this is fairly simple right? From like a data and technology perspective. So you just simply come up with an account score and an account stage. Right. So how do you do this. The account stage I can't remember off the top of my head what our account stages are in our own Salesforce. But it's like targeted working engaged, open opportunity customer and then stale.
EDDIE10:45I think if I remember correctly, and we've automated every single one of those, right. That's part of the reason why I can't remember it is because it's fully automated. So I think that that's exactly what those stages are so new. It just means like there's no activity. Working means there's activity within a recent period of time. Engage means that there's a meeting within a recent period of time.
EDDIE11:04Open opportunity means we have an open opportunity in Salesforce. Customer means they're a customer and stale means that they're not new. So there was some activity at some point, but there hasn't been any activity in X days. I think for us we call it 90 days, right. So right then and there, this is fully automated because we've integrated our email and calendar.
EDDIE11:24We can see every single account by stage and every single contact within that account by stage. And then you can say, okay, like here's our tier one account. Here's our account with the top score. And this one is still Mark new. So we gave our best rep one of our top. Let's just say we give our best wrap our top 50 accounts right.
EDDIE11:42And then the next rep gets the next 50 accounts and so forth. Okay. That's great. Is our top rep working all 50 of those accounts? If 20 of those accounts haven't been touched in 90 days, that's a real problem for the organization. And then we can do like a dynamic score as well. So we published an article recently on the AI driven always on continuously improving ICP.
EDDIE12:06And that was a paper that I wrote basically just talking about how do we leverage AI to identify our ICP and our best accounts, and how do we build an account score. And I won't go into that in great detail, but like to numb that down. It's pretty simple. You look at your best customers, the ones that have the highest LTV, the ones that you win the most.
EDDIE12:25You look at all the lost opportunities, all the loss leads, etc. and you reverse engineer it and you find specific criteria. You need to go deeper than just like what the initial firm of graphic and graphic data is, and find the unique attributes that really describe your particular customer. And then you can use AI to continuously analyze every single new customer, every single new deal, every single new lead, and filter through that and identify what are the trends that are telling us where we're winning and where we're losing.
EDDIE12:49And if you have this always on score, you can enrich your data as soon as you identify a new account, newly new prospect, etc. and you can assign it an account score and then you could feed that into this system. Now, we do think it's really important that you have a human in the loop here, but you can feed that that score into the system and you can say, here's all of our top accounts.
EDDIE13:09And oh, by the way. Here's our top accounts that aren't being worked properly. And if that's assigned to our best rap, the first thing that we can do is reassign those accounts. Or I've worked in organizations in the past before where the rule was if an account is not touched in X days, it's free game. Whoever grabs it, grabs it.
EDDIE13:25That's kind of cool. I remember getting like screamed at by reps in my first job out of college for like calling on their territory, quote unquote. And I remember, like, my boss's boss jumping in and saying, like, you haven't called this this customer in a year, so you have absolutely no right to like, get upset that someone else is calling them.
EDDIE13:41And by the way, I closed a ton of business by calling other reps accounts that they were ignoring.
RACHAEL13:46And so you should, right? Because otherwise they just get left behind. And as since you close them, obviously there were good accounts that could have been closed. And if you didn't do that, they would have never been closed. You would have missed that revenue.
EDDIE13:56Yeah. And so much of this goes into like metrics and analysis like I remember.
EDDIE14:00So when I was at Salesforce, we had a series of individuals that covered a specific territory. And I never fully understand how this how this worked. But the rumor was that Salesforce territories were built on zip codes. So when I started, one of my colleagues, she got assigned like the entire state of Ohio.
EDDIE14:18Right? It's like, okay, cool. You're covering Ohio. Fine. Well, as we grew and as her territory shifted to New York, mine started in New York. We ended up with, like, just like 1 or 2 zip codes. Okay, fine. Right. You're in Manhattan. You've got, like, a four square block radius. ZIP codes in Manhattan are pretty small, and there's a lot of people in there or a lot of companies, so that's fine.
EDDIE14:41But there's the one zip code I think it's 1011, which is Silicon Valley. That is just so rich with these tech companies. Like at the time, we work like we were covering like relatively small businesses. So we work at a $16 billion valuation was a huge outlier. And here's what I saw. I saw first one rep just tear through that territory, number one in the entire company, 200% of quota.
EDDIE15:09And I remember, like one of our execs coming on and like praising him and saying like, oh, like I'm not going to drop names, but like so-and-so is like number one in performance and also number one in new customers because we covered both new customers and existing. And I remember thinking, like, I just ask him like yesterday, if he ever does any prospecting.
EDDIE15:26He said he's never like made a cold call. So basically what you're saying is he's number one in new business because his territory is so rich that he's getting all these like massive number of inbound leads and you're jumping on like a team wide call with the entire, like, sales team across North America and praising him as the example of how to generate more new business when he's not doing any prospecting.
EDDIE15:47Okay, that's like a serious problem. Like you could see just by like looking at lead volume. That and also a call volume that he's not doing anything except just like taking orders. Fine. He's a good salesperson. He took those orders and converted them credit where credit is due. But if I was running, I don't want to say if I was running an organization because I think Salesforce was successful, but just because they're so big, right?
EDDIE16:12If like our team in our segment was the whole company, then I would have strong criticism of that. Given the Salesforce is so big, it's like nobody's perfect, whatever. Then I saw that territory hand it off. It was actually split two ways and handed off to like multiple reps and one rep got like the lion's share of like the good accounts in that territory and then ended up getting fired.
EDDIE16:36And she got fired. Not because she was like number one on the dash, because that's not a reason people get fired. But she just stopped showing up to work like she was crushing it number one on the dash and wouldn't come in like two days a week for like three hours and then just bounce, because that's how rich this territory was.
EDDIE16:53And so then all the other apps were like screaming and complaining and saying like, okay, like this person is just being fed the best territory and they're not working for it. And she made it really easy on everybody by just not showing up to work. So like it was abundantly obvious that this was true. But if she had just shown up to the office every day and put in the face time, she got fired and nobody would have noticed this because management was never paying attention to these kind of metrics.
EDDIE17:14And that's a huge disservice to everybody, because it really upsets the rest of the team, because you have the flip side where you have less experienced reps that are like fighting for their life and like really difficult territories, and they're like, here's like this rich like tier one account that is not even being called upon. And I'm over here, like fighting for my life, working this territory that is just like squeezing blood out of a stone.
EDDIE17:34And that is really demoralizing. And I feel like almost every sales team has that element.
RACHAEL17:38Yeah. And, you know, when sales were when Syros revenue leaders have this all star, you know, top sales person, the instinct a lot of the time is to try and reverse engineer what that person is doing into the team playbook, but that usually ends up in chaos, like you just said. You know, if they try to reverse engineer what she was doing, people just would only be working days a week and that actually wouldn't work at all.
RACHAEL18:01So how do you extract what's working for a top player without just canonized all of their idiosyncrasies and the stuff that they do that wouldn't actually work across an entire sales org?
EDDIE18:13and sold a couple companies for like $50 million in revenue each, he said.
EDDIE18:21You need to build a process that an average person with an on an average day with average effort can succeed, right? So we're not looking for like the unicorn sales route that like just as obsessed and has been for 20 years on this domain. We're looking for like the average person that can walk in like when I worked at Salesforce, a lot of people I worked with at sold copy machines previously.
EDDIE18:43I don't know why. I guess they have good sales training programs, but you're going from selling copy machines to CRM? Totally different, right? They had to build a system where an average person could walk in the door from selling copy machines and start talking to people about sales technology. Right. So how do we reverse engineer that sales process?
EDDIE19:01Well, I think there's like fundamental elements, many of which we have outlined in our go to market efficiency pyramid, whose our ICP and our buyer personas. Many companies don't define that granular enough. Hey, it's these 14 industries, between 1 million and $1 billion in revenue. Okay, cool. Good luck with that. Like go study up. You're in such a better position.
EDDIE19:21Like when I entered Salesforce, to some extent that was the environment I walked into. But they also said, hey, our best customers are software companies. Number one, professional services, number two, media and advertising. Number three, here's all the enablement that you need on these three industries. And by the way, I worked there for three years. I still don't know anything about media and advertising.
EDDIE19:40I got teched down pretty well and I got professional services down. Okay. So like where are you focusing people's energy. Right. So buyer personas. The next piece is what are the definitions and sales process. Right. What is a qualified lead. What is a good prospect to look like. What is a qualified sales opportunity look like? What is the process to run outbound?
EDDIE20:04What's the process to handle inbound? What's the process to work existing customers and identify expansion opportunities step by step by step. Who do we reach out to? How do we send them emails? I'll plug John Barrows for a moment. We had them on the podcast recently. He did that training at Salesforce, and he came in and he said, look, here's like soup to nuts in fine detail what a good sales email looks like and how you do your research and how you do an email.
EDDIE20:26Here's the training for that. Here's the template for that. Like when we had extensive training on that right here is like the script that you run through to do discovery. And yes, like you weren't discovery to be human. You're not reading off of a script. But here's a place to start. This is how you do discovery. I remember we had like, I was really struggling to sell part out, which is I think I don't even know what it's called today, probably some form of marketing cloud, but it competes with HubSpot if anybody's not familiar with it.
EDDIE20:52And I couldn't figure out how to sell it because I didn't have a background marketing, and I remembered one day they just came out and they're like, hey, a lot of people are struggling with this. Here's a specific whiteboarding session we can do. Here are the common problems that people are facing that should buy this product. 80% of leads that come in aren't ready to buy today, but 80% of those are going to buy within the next 24 months.
EDDIE21:15Here's why you need to nurture those leads. Here's how you do it. Here's how a tool like Pardot can help. Here's all the questions you ask. And this is all done via whiteboard. Literally. There was like a video training on how to do this. Right. So we break that down and we say okay, like what are the definitions?
EDDIE21:29What are the series of steps we need to take. What's the training for each of those steps? And then for me, what made my ramp up so much faster at Salesforce was embedding this into the CRM and the daily operations of being an employee at Salesforce. So what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is you have a dashboard that guides you on all the things you're supposed to do.
EDDIE21:50You're supposed to make X number of calls today. They really wanted us to call the power. That makes a huge difference in your ability to sell a Salesforce. So it was tracked like how many calls did you have and how many of those were to power and how many of those were to like junior people? Okay, we got calls down.
EDDIE22:03How many meetings do we have? Face to face meetings are better. So how many of those meetings are face to face? How much pipeline did you generate? What's your close rate? What's your sales cycle? What's your average deal size? How do you stack rank gets the rest of the team. And then we had intense scrutiny on our pipeline and constant coaching.
EDDIE22:22That combined with discovery. And then the questions you're supposed to ask in discovery are baked into Salesforce. So you open up an opportunity and there's an entire section there that they at the time called success selling criteria, which is basically similar to what we now have as medic or medic. And you've got all the ingredients there and you're like, literally open up an opportunity in Salesforce and you're staring at it and it's basically asking you pick and you're like, how do you forget this when you look at it every single day?
EDDIE22:48And I've been in other organizations where they send you to like two day training and you're like, right, everything down and stuff at your desk and you're trying to remember it six months later when you're live on a call.
EDDIE22:55I'll even add to this. Then on top of this, it was baked into the DNA of the organization. So when you sit down, you have a one on one with the sales manager. You have a forecasting call. You're sitting down with your SC to like prep for a deal. They're asking all the exact same questions, which just so happened to be fields in Salesforce.
EDDIE23:12And the s would just be like mercurial and say like, well, if you haven't follow these fields out in Salesforce, don't even talk to me. It's like, I'm not going to ask you who the decision maker is. I'm going to look in Salesforce and if it's not there, I'm going to decline your meeting request. So it just becomes like the like part of like the DNA of being an employee at that company.
EDDIE23:28And then anybody that doesn't follow that, they just fire them immediately, like no excuses. And that to me is really, really powerful. And I think there's like two things going on here. When you have this top performer. Number one, the crow is afraid to fire somebody that won't play ball, and that's a problem. But number two, a lot of times the reason that person doesn't want to play ball is because, like, you haven't designed a good system and they are winning by running a better system.
EDDIE23:54So build a better system.
RACHAEL23:56Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL24:19All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL24:21when you look at this top player who might be running a better system, a better process, and maybe it's a mix of that and a mix of them just having their own idiosyncrasies, and they're just like they have their talent above other people in the company. How do you pull out the things that you can actually use from what they do to improve your current processes, that all the B players can also do, and separate that from the things that are just specific to them.
EDDIE24:51I mean, I think one way to start, I mean, this is nuanced, right? But I think one way to start is you look at the metrics. So first thing I'm going to look at is like pipeline metrics, close rate sales cycle ASP. So if I am looking at like rap in the middle of the pack and our top performing rap and they have the same clothes, right?
EDDIE25:10And the same sales cycle and the same ASP, then I'm thinking, well, why are you not performing as well as the top performer? Well, clearly it's because you're not generating enough pipeline, right? Like you're taking the same you have the same results. Okay, let's imagine that's not the case. Okay. Let's say that close rates significantly lower. Well, I want to dive in and understand how they're doing discovery right now.
EDDIE25:32This depends on the organization. You had Colin Norton on our podcast that ran their AI score, and they found out that like discovery was not the like the driving factor for them winning deals. That's because Kyle works at owner, they sell a single mom and pop restaurants and it's a highly transactional sale, right? I haven't spent a lot of my career working in sales like that.
EDDIE25:53Most of the stuff I've done, even selling to smaller businesses, has been much more complex. Typically, discovery is what's going to drive close rate. So I want to know, like, how are they doing discovery? If I'm Kyle Norton and I'm running a transactional process, maybe I use one of these AI tools to figure out what's going on. In his case, it was about like urgency and asking for next steps and other things like that.
EDDIE26:15But I want to dive into that. I want to know why. Why is it closed right now out there and which of these things are coachable? Another thing that's going to be like a critical factor, at least in the types of sales that I've done, which is more similar to enterprise sales, is getting access to decision makers. Right.
EDDIE26:30Probably not applicable for Kyle Naughton because they're calling the owner of the small restaurant. But I saw this at Salesforce. Like the reps with the highest activity were the people that were calling the most junior people. They had more calls, more meetings, more deals, lower close rates, lower sales or slower sales cycles lower ASP. Right. How do you solve for that?
EDDIE26:51You solve for that by training them on how to get to power and how to have executive level conversations. And some of those people just did not have the talent to do that. And they washed out of Salesforce. So there is talent. Talent is a thing. But it was a very easily identifiable, viable behavioral trait that was literally smacking smacking you right in the face on the team dashboard.
EDDIE27:11Because those metrics like calls to power, face to face meetings, things like that, we're showing up right on our team dashboard that we all looked at every day. Okay, so now let's move off the pipeline. And let's say that like we're talking about outbound. I'm a big fan of like reading from right to left right. So we've started at revenue and we've gone to close rate sales cycle ASP.
EDDIE27:32Now let's look at pipeline generation. Let's look at how many meetings we're having and what is the ratio from meetings to pipeline generated. Maybe these meetings they're having is not converting the pipeline. Or maybe the activities that they're logging is not converting into meetings, or maybe they're just not logging enough activities. And if someone's not logging enough activities, there's a simple, simple answer there.
EDDIE27:54And if we have automated all of our capture of activities and meetings and potentially even maybe not fully automating, but helping to semi-automated the capture of qualified opportunities, then we can look at what our top reps are doing and compare it to the rest, and have a more objective view. One of the biggest problems that I've seen is if we say, okay, like everybody has to log everything manually, and then our top rep doesn't do that because it's extra work and they don't want to do it, then we don't have a clear view of what's working for them.
EDDIE28:24We don't know how many calls are actually making every day. And all this stuff can be automated now, so why not do it? And now we see exactly how many calls these top reps are making and how many meetings and their conversion rate. And I really love this from Kevin Dorsey. He talks about like coaching her up and sitting down and just saying, hey, look like.
EDDIE28:40So if you want to hit quota you need to do. 400 activities a day. Not because I think you should do. 400 activities a day. But that's just the math. If you look at the number of activities you have to do to get a meeting, the number of meetings you have to do to get an opportunity, the number of opportunities you have to do to get close to one based on your conversion rates you got to do for activities a day.
EDDIE28:59Do you want to do 400 activities day? No I don't. Okay. What else could we do? Like we could improve your your activity to meeting ratio. We can improve your meeting to to opportunity ratio etc.. Let's dive into that. Let's look at what you're doing versus what the top rep is doing. And this is something even Salesforce didn't do very well.
EDDIE29:16And I was really surprised by this. I thought, like you guys of all organizations should be really good at this. And I think Salesforce, at least when I was there, was really, really good at rev ops in general. But this is one gap that like I was starving for, especially when I first entered the organization. Like you've got all the data, why don't you use it?
EDDIE29:34It's all there. So those are the things that I would be looking for to replicate from like the top rep to the next rep. But then there's of course just going to be like things that you can't replicate. There's domain knowledge, there's charisma, there's other things that are just like, not every rep can replicate that equally. I mean, for me, for example, I'm not going to say that I'm the world's best salesperson, but I had a much deeper understanding of finance than anyone else that I worked with at Salesforce.
EDDIE29:59And so I did really, really well calling on CFOs. But I'm leveraging ten years of experience in finance, working on Wall Street, and also having studied finance and college. That's not something that you could just like train the guy that like was selling copy machines yesterday in like an hour or two. So like that's not a fair benchmark to compare.
EDDIE30:18But at the same time I was also leveraging like Excel templates that were given to me by Salesforce on how to do like buybacks, where you basically present to the CFO and say, look, if you buy all this crap now, it's going to cost you less money than if you buy it like slowly over time when you actually need it.
EDDIE30:32Because I'm going to give you this massive discount right now. Here's how the math works. We did have that. And I did have someone may colleagues come to me and just say, hey, can you help me build this spreadsheet so I can present this to the CFO? And I'm like, yeah, of course, no problem. So I think, like, there's a balancing act there, and I want to be sensitive to the fact that, like, you can't just make B players.
EDDIE30:51A players by snapping your fingers. But what you can do is you can show them the specific actions that they can take to improve their conversion rates and improve their performance to get them to quota. And you might still have like an A player that's at 200% of code and that's fine. That's great. But what you don't want is the only people that can hit quota are a players.
RACHAEL31:08How common would you say it is for these top eight players to be running like their own shadow systems? Because the official tech stack is just not working or it's broken, but they just kind of do it behind the scenes.
EDDIE31:19mean, I don't have data into that, but like if I had a guess based on my like 25 years in sales, I would just say that probably like the vast majority, I would guess 80% plus of organizations and salespeople were doing that.
RACHAEL31:29A lot. So, I mean, how do you reconcile that? Like,
RACHAEL31:33do you just let them do their own thing or do you investigate that and, you know, decide to bring in the tooling that they're using? How do you how do you know if if it's worth bringing to the rest of the team.
EDDIE31:45You're always going to have reps that are using other tools, right. So concrete example of this. I remember talking to a colleague at Salesforce like a very senior enterprise sales rep. I think he was like covering Verizon or AT&T or something like that. And he was just like showing me his whole system for how he built out, like Google Alerts.
EDDIE32:03And I was getting all these alerts on all the news that was happening in these organizations and how he was leveraging that. And that's fine. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. Like that's great. Like there's a top rep that's chasing $1 million plus of compensation, and they are leveraging every tool that they can get their hands on. I think Salesforce, as a general rule at that time, was doing relatively well at saying, here are the most important tools that we need.
EDDIE32:28Here are the most important systems and processes that we need, and we're going to make that available to as many sales reps as we possibly can. But it's a big organization. There are gaps. You know, they have reps that are selling like a single license to like a business with one employee all the way up to reps that were selling like 50 or $100 million plus deals.
EDDIE32:47I think I read the other day about a deal that was like in the multiple billions that they closed, I think, with the government. And so it's going to be hard to like, have that be perfect across the entire organization. But I think what you want to do as a general and like our audience is going to be like these midsize companies that are, you know, 20 million, 100 million, $300 million in revenue.
EDDIE33:07You don't have that big of a sales team. You look at each team and you say, like, okay, what are the most important things that can really drive revenue? And I start with process. What is that step by step process that you need to leverage in order to be successful in this role? And the best reps are always going to find, like other tools that are going to give them more of an advantage.
EDDIE33:26But I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's a bad thing when the only way you can succeed is by inventing your own stack.
RACHAEL33:33So another issue is the C player problem. You mentioned it a little bit before. When systems are a mess and you can't really tell the difference between like the performance of one person to the next. C players can look identical to be players. And so, so leaders like hammer on everyone for activity, but they still can't really tell them apart.
RACHAEL33:52How does the leader actually build the visibility to separate a B player who could perform from a C player who's hiding and just kind of like coasting along?
EDDIE34:01Well, let's be clear. Like
EDDIE34:03I think over the long term you can always identify the C players, right? Like the simplest way is for some of them they're just not going to hit quota. And then you just fire people. Like that's really simple. However if they have a really terrible territory of territories are incredibly unevenly distributed, you might fire somebody that looks like a C player and they're actually a B player or even an A player, maybe.
EDDIE34:25So there's that. I think more than that, the problem is just that it takes longer to identify. Right? So when I hire a new rep, the first thing that I'm hammering on is activity. And everybody always like, knocks this. But it's like, I really care how talented you think you are. If you're in day one of a sales job and you log three calls and then you do the same thing the next day and the next day and the next day, like it's not going to work.
EDDIE34:50So this is really simple. Like start working hard. And then the next thing I want to look at is are these activities translating into meetings. And then I want to look at these meetings translating into pipeline. Is pipeline translating into closed one deals. And are you hitting quota if you're hitting quota great. Like which of these things can we improve if you're not hitting quota, which of these things need to be improved the most.
EDDIE35:09And you read from right to left. But I think like it can be difficult to objectively look at this if you have incredibly uneven territories, your teams not logging your activities, you can't see their meetings, you don't trust the pipeline that they're entering. And so you only thing you can go by is what's closed one. And then you're wondering, did this person hit quota because they got a bunch of rich inbound leads, because they got lucky with like one account that was assigned to them or because they're good and they worked really hard.
EDDIE35:43Did this person miss quota because they're lazy and they're not talented or because they worked really hard and they didn't have any decent accounts? I think that that's like a really tough call to make. And I saw this even at Salesforce, where even some of these top reps that I'm referring to, they started off in some like really terrible territory and they couldn't hit quota, but they managed to like, work really hard and show the manager that they knew what they were doing, and they brought them into calls where they were like positioning themselves.
EDDIE36:10Well, and then the manager saw that and said, okay, like, this is good. I have faith in this person. I'm going to give them a really good territory next year. And now we're getting into politics, right? Even at a company like Salesforce, you have like these limitations with data, especially in the way that they carved out territories, at least for my team, that I think was like really unevenly distributed.
EDDIE36:33And for me, what I would much rather do is I would want to look at this on an account by account basis. And I would want to know, here's the score of every single account that we're going after. Here's the stage each account is in. Here's the percentage of each account, percentage of accounts that have moved into an engaged or an open opportunity.
EDDIE36:55And I want to see how each of my reps are doing in that regard. And if I've got a bunch of accounts assigned to my top rep that aren't getting worked, I want to move that to to another rep.
EDDIE37:04if I've got a rep that can't move any of these accounts, then like that's a real problem.
RACHAEL37:08Is there a specific number or percentage of closed revenue that a company should try to reach with their their B players compared to their A players? Like? I imagine there's a flight risk.
EDDIE37:21With quota.
RACHAEL37:23What percentage of that like how much quota attainment should be from your all star players versus the rest of everybody else? Because if you're leaning so much on your A players, there's a flight risk there, right? Like if if they walk and then suddenly you've lost so much of your revenue or potentially pipeline or customers walk because of because they've gone to a different competitor, let's say.
EDDIE37:45Interesting question. Right. So there's so much debate on this. I don't know that I have an opinion on what percentage of people that hit quota should be A players versus B players, or if that matters, if 100% of those people are A players and they're crushing it. And when I say 100%, I'm talking about a large number, like, let's say that we've got a sales team of over 100 people, and let's say that like 70 of them are at like two x quota and they're just crushing it.
EDDIE38:13I don't think there's an organization on Earth that can say that unless they're like anthropic, but like, that sounds great to me. I don't see a problem with that. And then now we're just splitting hairs on the definition of a player and what quota should be. But the reality is, most organizations and organizations in aggregate, another number in front of me.
EDDIE38:30But I think it's like only like 40% of reps hit quota or something like that, which is awful. It's demoralizing. What other job on earth do you walk into where 60% of your colleagues are working overtime and being told that they suck at their job and they're a failure? Like name it? It's hard for me to think of a job other than like Navy Seal that has that low of a success rate and even Navy Seals once they get out of training, I don't think that it works.
EDDIE39:00It operates that way. So I think that that's incredibly awful and demoralizing. And I would focus on the percentage of reps that are hidden quota. Now what should that number be? It's not 100%. If 100% of reps are hitting quota, then you've made quota too low. But this is my personal soapbox. I don't know that like, this is necessarily like a data backed opinion, but I have personally been in a job where I was at 500% of quota, 504%, and it did not.
EDDIE39:31It did not inhibit me from being motivated to try to get to 505% in that job. I happened to be number one in the company, and it was a fortune 500 company. So that that was nice. I got to go to Hawaii, I got to go to Disneyland. I got all the trips and all that stuff, and it was really wonderful and met all the other people, Presidents Club, and that was incredibly motivating for me.
EDDIE39:51The fact that my quota was like super easy to attain, like meant nothing to me. So I don't know. I don't have like a strong opinion on this. I think it should definitely be higher than 40 or 50 or 60%, but probably less than 100%.
RACHAEL40:05so for a revenue leader that's suspecting that their growth has been star led or founder led, how do they know when they've hit the point where that's going to stop working for them?
EDDIE40:15I don't know that it necessarily ever hits a point where it stops working. I think it's really about efficiency, right? There are plenty of organizations. I mean, when I talk to you about the problems in Salesforce ad, this is during the time they grew from 5 billion to $10 billion in revenue. Now, that being said, like definitely lots of B players were hitting quota at Salesforce.
EDDIE40:35Less so in certain teams and over certain years. And as things progressed, especially after I left, I heard horror stories about how like, there's only six reps across North America in certain segments that were hitting quota, and that's pretty awful. But I think that they built a system where at least when I was there, B players could succeed.
EDDIE40:57I think that, I mean, look like if you've got 100 salespeople and only five salespeople are hitting quota, like, like the crow is going to get fired and you have a woefully broken go to market, and the CEO is probably going to get fired, too. And heads are going to roll. And this is really, really bad. If you've got an organization where only 40% of reps are hitting quota, that can be pretty demoralizing.
EDDIE41:19But that's standard right now or whatever the number is. Don't quote me on this, but it's in that ballpark. I think it really just comes down to like how fast you want to grow. And if you build a go to market system where you can take an average rep that comes in that's professional, does their homework, does research on accounts before they reach out, knows the product, understands the customer, runs decent discovery and just runs through the process.
EDDIE41:44Puts in their 9 to 5 of their 8 to 6 and they work hard. But they're not like killing themselves and they can hit quota. Then you have the kind of organization that can really scale. If the only way that somebody can hit quota is working 90 hours a week and being God's gift to both sales and your own domain expertise, then I think that you have set up a system where your organization can't succeed, or at least can't grow nearly as fast as it could otherwise.
RACHAEL42:07And what's.
RACHAEL42:08The culture layer to all of this? Because, you know, it seemed that has this all star player. Everyone knows that they get a pass. They're not necessarily held to the rules that everyone else follows because they're making the company so much money. What does that do to a team over time, and how do you, like fix the process problem without either alienating your best rep or breeding resentment across everyone else?
EDDIE42:31Well, I think it just depends on the organization and the culture and how many of these a player's there are, and how many people are not hitting quota, and how these players are treated and how everyone else is treated. And then also like the individual personalities of of people in every side of this, for me personally, like whenever I've been in an organization and I saw an a player crushing it and getting away with all these things, and I've been both like the A player and the B player and the C player.
EDDIE42:56I don't know if I've ever been a key player in the sense that, like, I haven't worked hard because I've always worked hard, but I've definitely been in situations where like, I wasn't in quota and I was at risk of getting fired or actually been fired. So I've been there. It never bothered me to see like an a player that gets away with some things.
EDDIE43:13It's like, fine. Like, you know, you're bringing a lot of money into the organization. If you can spend more in your expense account, you can cut corners here and there. Like, I don't really care. For me personally, it was always just like, is this fair to me? That's all I care about is me. I don't care about anybody else.
EDDIE43:26I know other people feel differently, but overall, I think the thing that's most demoralizing is if you're looking at this and you're saying, look, I'm sitting in a territory that's very poorly designed and it's virtually impossible for me to hit quota. And I look over here and I see this top rep ignoring a bunch of accounts that I would kill to have, and they're not even calling on them.
EDDIE43:44Like, that's absolutely demoralizing. And like, that's, I think, for me, a hard pill to swallow because I'm thinking the organization would benefit by redistributing those accounts. So it's not just that I'm losing out like everybody is losing out. Like even the A player isn't benefiting by having these accounts that they ignore. So that's like a real problem, right?
EDDIE44:04Outside of that, I think that everybody wants to go to an organization that has a strong playbook. And if the playbook is, hey, figure it out for yourself.
EDDIE44:15Then I think that
EDDIE44:17that's going to detract. A lot of people both like inside the organization as well as people that want to work there. And you also got to keep in mind, what does it mean to be an A player?
EDDIE44:26And a player might be somebody that has come in and they have like built up all this domain knowledge over many years and now they've like carved out like a niche for themselves. But what is like the A player and the other organization that's considering working their thinking when they like, interview with the company and find out that hardly any of the reps are hidden quota.
EDDIE44:42The only reps that are hidden quota have been there for ten years. And they know, like all the ins and outs and all the secrets and where all the bodies are buried and they're looking at this and they're like, I'm crushing it in my current organization, but I'm not sure that I could crush it in this organization.
RACHAEL44:55It spans a lot of different layers.
EDDIE44:57So let me make 11. because like this is something that I saw a lot at Salesforce. Right? So you know, like I'm not trying to pretend like Salesforce has the best salespeople on earth or that it's the best company on Earth, but a lot of people want to hire reps from Salesforce. Like, we would get calls from recruiters all day, every day promising all kinds of like more money, etc., etc. and when I left Salesforce and I interviewed at other organizations, it's just like a slam dunk.
EDDIE45:21Like I just picked six companies I wanted to work for all of them. Like huge steps up in terms of like what I was selling and I got six out of six offers, and not because I think I'm like the world's best salesperson. It's just like, that's the Salesforce brand. And so you're trying to attract reps of that caliber.
EDDIE45:38And what I saw from like especially the A players that I worked with at Salesforce is they were trying to game the system in their favor. If they were interviewing for promotion at Salesforce, they're trying to figure out like, which promotion can I get that's going to give me the best territory. How can I set myself up for success?
EDDIE45:54How can I walk in to a situation where I'm likely to crush it and be at 200%, 300% of my quota, which is going to further pad my resume, which is going to give me more opportunities inside this organization and outside of this organization. And if someone like that, that like your CRO and you're listening to this and you're like, I need to hire that person, you have to have something really attractive to offer them.
EDDIE46:15And if what you have to offer them is, hey, like, walk in here and this thing's going to be a mess and just figure it out. Well, going back to first principles for investing, if I'm like the top rep at a company like Salesforce or Anthropic or Google or whatever, and I can get a job anywhere I want, and you and every CRO on the planet is trying to hire me.
EDDIE46:34What am I going to ask? I'll tell you this. Like 15 years ago when I was interviewing for jobs, one of my first questions I always asked was, are you guys on Salesforce? Because if you tell me that you're running your go to market off of Excel, I'm not dealing with that shit like hard. No. Like interview is done full stop.
EDDIE46:52Right. And now it's been over ten years since I've interviewed for a job, so I'm not sure what questions I would ask, but I would ask a lot of questions around quota attainment, about the playbook, about how the process is designed, about how territories are designed. And I would try and I try to assess I'm going to risk my income on this company.
EDDIE47:10Is this a good bet? And if I'm a top rep, I'm going to be interviewing with 5 or 10 other organizations, and many of them are going to have really promising things to say about that. And if I'm interviewing with a crow and they're like, yeah, you're just gonna have to come here and figure it out, and there's some massive financial incentive to make up for that.
EDDIE47:29I'm not taking that job.
RACHAEL47:31Doubts the other side of it to you. You want to be able to attract these A players.
RACHAEL47:35If a leader is listed, revenue leader is listening to this and recognizing their organization. All this, they're feeling dependent on a couple of a players.
RACHAEL47:43They're blinded. See players, they might be washing out their B players and not letting them succeed the way that they should or could be. What's the first move? Where do you actually start? Let's like right after listening to this podcast, what the what should they do?
EDDIE47:58Great question. I mean
EDDIE48:01this goes back into like where do you start with go to market? And like we've produced a bunch of content on this, the go to market ops diagnostic, the go to market efficiency pyramid and the go to market ops roadmap. And I think in some sense a lot of this applies here, but specifically to reps, what I would want to know is, number one, am I giving everybody a sufficient opportunity vis a vis territory plans.
EDDIE48:27So I would want to like run my ICP and get it right. I'd want to do capacity planning. So I figure out how many accounts are reps can actually cover, whether it's new or existing or both, and whether they're doing outbound or inbound, what have you. And I would want to build territory plans such that I can expect everybody to work 100% of their best accounts, and then I would want to build a performance system where I can assess this.
EDDIE48:51I'd want to build a foundational data layer and the process and playbooks to say like, this is how we do outbound, this is how we do inbound. This is how we do expansion sales for doing a B in. This is how we do ABM. Here's where the metrics lie. I'd want to build the systems to automate all the data capture, and that I'd want to start using.
EDDIE49:09I'd want to start to engage a driven coaching. I'd want to do what we discussed earlier in this call and be able to go to rep and say, look, you're at 80% of quota. Here is specifically where you're falling short of the people that are hidden quota. This is what your close rate looks like. This is what your activities and meetings ratio looks like, etc. specifically, here's where you're doing well.
EDDIE49:29Here's where you're doing okay. Here's where you're doing badly. Where would you like to improve most? Do you want to make 400 calls a day to hit quota, or would you like to improve one of these metrics? Because if you want to prove one of these metrics, I can coach you on how to do that.
RACHAEL49:43Well.
RACHAEL49:43That is all we have today for this topic. And if you want to learn more about defining these processes and where you're at in your current go to market ops maturity for your different outbound processes and systems, you can check that out at Union Square. Consulting frameworks slash the go to market efficiency pyramid. We have a framework that outlines all the the four stages of go to market ops maturity to reach go to market efficiency.
RACHAEL50:14So you can check out like where you are in fundamentals, what you need to develop in order to be able to move on to the next step, optimization, then adoption and then amplification at this time.
EDDIE50:26Really? Well, yeah, this ties in really well what we're talking about. Because like the way that I described fundamentals is these are the basic building blocks that you need for your people to do their jobs. That's it. Like if I'm going to run outbound I need ICP well-defined, I need a solid territory plan. And I need to understand the process and the messaging that I'm going to use to reach out to these folks.
EDDIE50:47So if I am an A player or a B player or a C player that's entering a new organization or in a new organization, and you're coaching me on how to improve, like if you don't have this stuff laid out, then we're just playing whack a mole and spitballing ideas on how I could get better. Instead of saying like, this is what works.
EDDIE51:04This is what we have seen in the past because we didn't just start the company yesterday has shown to work to generate and close pipeline. Here's the playbook, here's the metrics, here's how you do this. The fundamentals in the good market efficiency pyramid. Describe in detail exactly how to build that. And the good news is that the organizations that we've worked with, including the large organizations that are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, you can nail this stuff in like 30, 60, 90 days.
EDDIE51:31And when I say nail this stuff, I'm talking about the fundamentals and the adoption of like 1 or 2 go to market motions. So like the outbound process, maybe pipeline management, maybe we're like primarily an app driven organization. And you say, okay, like what if I could get all my reps running their outbound process and managing their deals the right way?
EDDIE51:48Not perfectly, but like nobody's just like skipping huge critical steps and just dropping balls left and right. You can easily achieve that, especially for one type of sale in 90 days or far less. Now, you might have an 18 month sales cycle, and it takes time to see the fruits of that labor. But even with an enterprise sales cycle of 18 months, there is no reason you can't say.
EDDIE52:09We need to know who the decision maker is on every deal. Let's figure out how to implement a process to generate that result. It doesn't take 180 days or 18 months to figure out who the decision maker is in a deal. At least, I don't think maybe there's exceptions people can call me out on. There's no reason this has to take quarters and quarters and years and years to get your salespeople set up for success.
EDDIE52:32And so that's what the fundamentals are. Check out the go to market efficiency pyramid. It's why we wrote it and then updated it multiple times. Yeah because it'll help you.
RACHAEL52:43Awesome.
RACHAEL52:44Thank you so much, Eddy.
EDDIE52:45Thanks, Rachel.
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EDDIE53:00We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
